1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to tools and methods for developing web services.
2. Background Art
A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is based on functional units known as services. These services are typically provided by self contained code modules that may be executed remotely in a distributed computing environment, such as is provided by the Internet. The services are described a language, such as Web Services Description Language (WSDL). The term WSDL will be used throughout to describe any such service descriptive language.
In SOA, services are typically created by first establishing a contract or interface between interested parties. This contract often describes the messages that are going to be sent and received as well as the manner by which these messages are to be exchanged. This contract may be written as a WSDL document.
Some integrated development environments (IDEs) provide facilities for creating web services from WSDL. However, these IDEs assume that the WSDL is final and not subject to further change. Often, in actual development, this is not the case, as the WSDL description is likely to change and evolve together with the implementation of the service. Current tools do not support this realistic dynamic workflow environment.